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Ok, so, my new kid’s about 19 days old, according to the tally on Facebook, so I guess it’s time I post an update about life in the McDonnell household.  I may or may not be motivated by the fact that I have a new computer and wanted to try typing something on it, but whatever.  I’m still updating my blog, so let’s not analyze the reasons too closely.

Things are going … ok.  For the first week and a half, Rob stayed home with us and everything was pretty much blissful.  When Kaylee was brand new, we were pretty panicky about the new parent thing, and every little whimper stressed us out.  This time around, we’ve been a lot less worried about doing everything perfectly and we’ve been willing to settle for just being good enough.  The kid’s still breathing and doesn’t have any serious skin rashes brought on by the condition of our home or anything, so we figure we’re doing all right.

By the end of that first week and a half, I was feeling pretty confident.  Cocky, even.  “I’ve got this in the bag,” I thought.  The crying and the mood swings and the not-eating that I went through with Kaylee were pretty much absent, and I thought maybe I could get through this newborn stage without ever feeling like I’d need to be committed to a mental institution.

Cue the ominous music.

So.

Then Rob went back to work.  And I had to take care of both of them.  By myself.

Dude.

Did you guys know that watching a newborn and a toddler at THE SAME TIME can be really hard?  I had guessed that might be the case, but I always thought it would be the baby that would be making me crazy.  Little did I know that the baby would be the easy one.

Kaylee really seems to like her little brother, as long as he’s sitting in a swing or something and not requiring any attention from me.  But the moment I have the baby in one arm and am holding his bottle in the other hand, she decides she suddenly, desperately needs to be picked up and carried into the other room.  She’s gotten whinier.  She’s gotten meaner.  She’s gotten me to yell more in the past week than in the previous year combined.

And so there have been a few times this week that I’ve been right back where I was two and a half years ago, crying for no reason and trying to figure out how in the hell other mothers manage to survive having ANY children, much less more than one.  (And the Duggars?  Holy shit.  You know they’ve got to be batshit crazy by now.)

But then there are other moments when it all makes perfect sense.  Kaylee will randomly decide to give her brother a kiss, or the two of them will practice their fist bumps.  (That’s mostly Kaylee saying, “Give me knucks, little brother!” while holding out her fist and waiting for his flailing hand to bump into hers.)  And sometimes Kaylee will climb in my lap while I’m giving Robbie a bottle, and she’ll cuddle with me on one side while he snuggles in on the other.  And sometimes, like Friday, Kaylee stops worrying altogether about whether she’s getting less attention from me, and she just acts like a joyful little kid again, running and playing and laughing and speaking in a normal voice rather than a grating whine.

So when I’m asked how it’s going, the answer is that it really depends on the day.  This Wednesday, I almost wrote a long and sobby post about how depressed I was, because I’d had a really awful day.  And then I would have deleted it on Friday, because we had a wonderful day in which everyone was happy, and I would have been embarrassed by the self-indulgent crybaby crap that would have composed that post.

We’re surviving.  Sometimes life’s good, sometimes bad, sometimes ugly, and often slightly damp from all the getting-peed-on.  But I think we’re going to make it.

A note: I just went back and re-read this, and I feel like I’ve made Kaylee sound kind of evil.  She’s still a pretty good kid.  When I say she’s mean, I’m saying it in the hyperbolic way I tend to say things on my blog.  She’s just kind of jealous, I think, and it makes her more likely to cry at nothing and whine about how badly she needs a bag of Cheetos.  Kind of like her mother.